In the last week of July, media were busily reporting the Q2 earnings of YouTube parent company Alphabet, with one analyst suggesting that YouTube as a unit is worth $75 billion (in other words, “five Twitters”). This is fantastic news for those of us who are bullish on YouTube.

YouTube’s continued success highlights one of our biggest preoccupations as a company: video creators are the bedrock upon which YouTube is built. How can we optimize the payments process for this crucial segment of the YouTube ecosystem so they can keep growing?

We have two exciting updates on this front, with payments use cases involving music content that have been outliers up until now.

Asset Manager

Much has been made of ensuring musicians receive the royalties owed to them from music streaming on YouTube. One of the challenges in getting creators paid is that there is often no linkage between monthly revenue report data and the artist that is owed royalties. This is because when an asset is uploaded directly to a YouTube CMS, there is no Asset Channel ID reflecting ownership in the revenue report data. Sure, there is an Artist field that can be manually filled when uploading Assets, but in our experience this is only done a small percentage of the time. So you can do a lot of claiming, but in these cases there’s no way to identify that revenue and pay it out to the creator efficiently.

So we took it upon ourselves to build a solution! Our new Asset Manager helps you assign revenue that lacks an Asset Channel ID back to a creator. Once you’ve assigned an Asset to a creator, our system will remember and pay them for that Asset in perpetuity.

As any Content ID user can tell you, an Asset ID is necessary to process incoming revenue from claims so it doesn’t sit unprocessed. Our new feature serves to bridge the earnings to the rights holder/musician.

YouTube Red Music

As our clients know, music calculations are significantly more complex because of the different rates of revenue for each country. Calculations become even more complex as YouTube Red expands to new territories (which, of course, is a good thing).

Pro Rata this, Per Sub Minimum that…who has the time? Probably not you. That’s why we’ve updated our YouTube Red payments calculation to include revenue from YouTube Red Music, and automatically process the correct payment rates for each country. Distributing royalties to artists is now much easier than before!

Thanks for bearing with us while we geek out about getting hard-working creators paid. We’re always working away on payments quirks, loopholes, and new use cases. If you work for an influencer network with a payments challenge that needs solving, reach out and let us know.

They’re all over YouTube: great examples of fan engagement, a source of valuable data, and viewers love them. But you don’t. You’re claiming the same video over and over because for each piece of your owned content it contains, you’re forced to enter a unique asset, policy, and claim type. Trying to place multiple claims probably makes you feel a little:

By popular demand, the Paladin platform now helps you to easily make multiple claims on a single YouTube video. With our Rights Monitor module, you can choose many assets or policies per video and place many claims at once, saving you time and repetition.

Check it out in the example below. Simply add a row for each claim you want to place, and select Asset IDs and specific policies for each. You can add as many as you need. Then, simply click “Claim” to trigger all claims simultaneously. That’s it.

This feature builds on Paladin’s existing capabilities that allow you to claim multiple similar videos (read: TV show episodes) with a single click, and to monitor fast-spreading ripped viral videos to claim your content before revenue opportunities are lost.